Secret Harmonies

by Paul J McAuley

  “It minimises transit time through the dust in the plane of the Solar System,” Jon said. “And besides, the launch track is made up of more than a hundred autonomous gravithic generators. Even half that number would be enough to get the colonyboat up to the speed where its own gravity warp starts acting as a ramscoop.”

  “Jon has gone into the technical aspect thoroughly,” de Ramaira told Rick. “As for politics, there never was a faction in Congress completely set against colonisation. No one there wants to leave the stars to the Russians. What we need, you see, is a way of finding out what’s happening on Earth.”

  Rick said, “Don’t you think the City Board have taken all this into account? I guess Constat can work out what might have happened on Earth far better than any of us can. Social dynamics is what it’s supposed to be good at, after all.”

  “The City Board knew about Landing Day, too,” Web said. “Even if Constat can make a guess at what’s happened, we surely aren’t going to be told. But we don’t need to make a guess. We can find out directly!”

  “You have a working colonyboat, is that it?” Rick grinned at de Ramaira, and immediately felt a pang of shame. After all, to de Ramaira this was as much a personal as a global disaster. But Rick felt that he couldn’t play this straight.

  Jon said, with earnest seriousness, “We don’t need any spaceship. The University already has something just as good.”

  “Oh? That’s news to me.”

  “I said it wouldn’t be any good,” Web told Jon. “I said this guy would play the authority line.”

  “You must be pleased to have your prejudices confirmed,” Lena told Web, and flashed her dazzling smile at Rick as she poured herself more red wine.

  Rick sipped from his own glass, sourness diffusing to a general warmth on his tongue. He was the focus of the others’ attention—de Ramaira’s gentle wistful yearning, Web’s fierce bitter scorn, John’s eager optimism, Lena’s amusement—and he wanted out. Stay aloof, tread lightly in the world. Still, he felt an obligation to de Ramaira. “All right,” he said, “I guess you better tell me what your idea is.”

  Jon glanced sideways at Web, who shrugged, then told Rick, “The idea is that we can use the relay station to listen in on Earth’s radio traffic. It was used for that years ago, wasn’t it? Why not again?”

  “It picked up a laser signal aimed specifically at Tau Ceti, and from the edge of the Solar System, too,” Rick said, “not the effluvia of a civilisation almost a dozen light-years away. And I don’t think the City Board would approve of your meddling; nor would the University for that matter—it owns the relay station, after all.”

  “That’s why we’re asking you,” Jon said. “I mean, you work on the relay station. Couldn’t you—”

  “I was sent out there to do a job. It wasn’t my choice, and if I’d known all the trouble it would bring down I wouldn’t have gone along with it.”

  “But you were on trivee—”

  “Because I was asked to say that the relay station was okay! That’s all. And it was okay, too. But I’ve no authority over the relay station. Really.”

  “Hasn’t your friend Professor Collins something to do with it?” de Ramaira suggested.

  “He’s something to do with just about everything at the University. But I can’t propose something like this to him. You’re the engineer, Web. You can think of half a dozen reasons why it’s impossible.”

  Web shrugged his side. “The thing is that the dish antenna is there. It’s working, right? The University isn’t doing anything with it, and who’s to tell the City Board? They’ve cheated us, maybe it’s our turn.”

  Rick saw then why they wanted to believe it. Everyone on Elysium had been indoctrinated with the comforting engineering principle that all problems have a solution, and all too few questioned that, with so much on the world still unexplored and unexplained. He pushed back his chair, said flatly, “Before I go, just let me talk to you alone for a minute, David.”

  Three boys circled an old man in a quilted overjacket, bent to breathe the cloying reek of bliss which leaked from the capsule he had broken between his black-painted nails. Rick pushed around them and came face to face with the student from Communications.

  “Some party, right?” Rick said.

  The student smiled nervously around his glass of wine. “I didn’t realise you knew Web, Dr Florey,” he said.

  “I don’t. You do? Maybe you should talk him down from his crazy ideas.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if they’re all that crazy,” the student said, his mild white face settling into a serious expression.

  “If you believe shit like that, there’s little hope for you,” Rick said, and shoved on past, regretting his spasm of anger at once.

  De Ramaira caught up with him when he reached the head of the helical staircase. “You shouldn’t be so disheartening,” de Ramaira said. “They have to believe in something.”

  “And what about you?” Rick leaned on the railing by the staircase and gazed down at the roofs which stepped away into the scintillating web of the nighttime city. Its glow bleached the sky of all but the brightest constellations. The Big Dipper almost directly overhead. Troilus, the biggest of the gas giants in Tau Ceti’s system, a steady yellow lamp rising out of the forests in the east. And there too, just at the horizon, the sprawling constellation of Scorpio, harbinger of winter, Antares a burning red eye. Rick traced a line upward, looking for Serpens Caput, the constellation in which Sol was a fifth-magnitude star. But it was lost in the city’s glare.

  De Ramaira leaned beside Rick, but he was watching the surge of the party. After a moment, he said, “Do you know, one of the more popular theories is that Earth no longer sends us ships because we’ve become unworthy of them. Though these Neo-Platonists have yet to advance any suggestion as to how we might achieve redemption.”

  “Well, it’s no more crazy than the idea about the relay station.”

  “It isn’t feasible? You jumped on them pretty heavily back there.”

  “Most of Earth’s communications are either cabled or bounced off satellites, and interplanetary stuff is lasered, so that to intercept it you’d have to be between receiver and transmitter. That leaves a lot of radio noise, but you couldn’t do more than detect it. Sure, interstellar communication is possible with bad noise-to-signal ratios. Even with more noise than signal, but only as long as the data rate is slow, and reasonable modulation and coding is used. And the old transmissions were weak, too, even if they were aimed straight at us. That’s why an isolated antenna system had to be used to pick them up, just the output from one unshielded motor was more energetic. But the kind of stuff Web and Jon want to unravel will be orders of magnitude weaker, and spilling all over each other, and swamped with interstellar hash besides. If they want to find out if the Solar System’s a radio emitter, fine, but that still won’t help them explain anything.”

  “At least we’d know Earth is still there.”

  “I guess the Sun is as great a radio emitter as Tau Ceti. And there’s that big gas giant, Jupiter?”

  De Ramaira banged the rail with the heels of his palms and said, “Sometimes the intractability of the universe is not to be believed!”

  “You think those two are serious? Web seems to be, at any rate.”

  “Really, I don’t know him very well.”

  De Ramaira stepped aside as someone, in trash aesthetique sleeveless mesh vest and baggy shorts buckled at the knees, swayed past and blundered down the helical stairs. The very blond, very long-haired young man following him paused to say, “He’s just blissed out is all, the crowd is messing up his interface.” The mesh of his vest was livid, fluorescent green. There was a yin-yang symbol tattooed on the hinge of his acne-scarred jaw. He laid a hand on de Ramaira’s arm and said, “I’ll see he comes down okay, David. It’s a nice party.”

  As the blond youngster clattered down the stairs after his friend, de Ramaira said with a smile, “These young people can’t carry
the load. What were we talking about?”

  “Web.”

  “Oh, Web. Web is Jon’s friend, and Jon brings his friends to hear the Earthman speak.”

  “I get the impression that Jon is your protege.”

  “He has a genuine passion for biology—and a real intellect too, I might add. It is also a pleasure to talk with someone who regards knowledge as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Present company excepted, of course. I can tolerate his friends, and who knows? I might win converts. I hope that Jon will be able to work in pure science once he’s graduated. It would be a damn shame to lose him to the farmers.”

  “So he’ll carry on the good fight.”

  “Someone has to support me in the great lost cause of trying to persuade my friends in Agriculture to control the rabbits. I don’t know what the Seeding Council was thinking of. Gene-melded dogs and sheep, that’s fine. So are horses and cows. But rabbits? Never mind a colonyboat’s not arriving. In a hundred years or so, with all the food they can eat and with no native predator able to eat them, those cute little bunnies will have stripped this continent clean.”

  “Talking of your friends in Agriculture, that reminds me. Some of the staff have been saying some pretty nasty things about you since Landing Day. It hasn’t helped that you haven’t turned up for work.”

  “Oh, I can imagine just the sort of thing,” de Ramaira said lightly. “Even before my reports were going back via the colony-boat drivers—odd to think, isn’t it, that the first hasn’t even reached Earth yet—even then, I had to put up with all sorts of shit. Well, no one is going to wait around in case a ship does turn up, least of all my busy friends in Agriculture! However, I have this house, and the credit I’ve accumulated by not living on the hill, and equipment I’ve, ah, borrowed from the University over the years. You see, I’ve always been prepared for the worst. Please don’t worry that I haven’t thought things through, Rick; I’ve been doing nothing else this past week.”

  “You think it’ll come to that? They’ll kick you out?”

  “I should add that the day after Landing Day wasn’t, I had a visit from the cops.”

  “Jesus. What did they want?”

  “I thought it better not to ask, especially as they didn’t seem very sure themselves. They searched the house rather efficiently—I still haven’t finished clearing up after them—but they didn’t find whatever it was they thought I was hiding. Perhaps they believed I’d abducted the descent pod.”

  “And you hadn’t?”

  “I’ll let you into a secret. All the time the cops were turning the place upside-down I stood by with a large hat on my head. They didn’t think to ask me to take it off.” De Ramaira winked, and Rick laughed. It was not a very good joke, but it was a welcome one.

  “Dr Florey?”

  He turned, and Lena smiled at him. “I brought your wine.” She held out the tumbler.

  “I’d better see what those two are up to,” de Ramaira said, pushing up on the rail to look over the heads of the crowd toward the corner where Jon and Web sat together, blond head by black. Web was scribbling on Jon’s piece of paper, seemingly oblivious of the party’s noise. De Ramaira asked Lena, “Did they drive you off?”

  She shrugged. “Sort of.”

  “Well, you look after Rick for me. I think he’s had enough of their ideas as well.”

  As de Ramaira was received by the crowd, the girl, Lena, asked Rick, “Hey, you’re not angry at anyone, are you?”

  “Nobody in particular.”

  “Oh, they always talk an awful lot up here, as if talking solved anything.”

  She did not have Cath’s fashionably brittle, angular beauty. But, framed by jet-black hair, her squarish face was animated by a mischievous intelligence. A wide, sexy mouth, small tilted nose. Gold-flecked hazel eyes that boldly returned his gaze.

  “Do you come here a lot?” Rick asked. “Do you like it?”

  “Sometimes.” For a moment Rick was unsure which question she had answered, but she added, “Oh, Dr de Ramaira is okay, but I do get to thinking that this is all put on for Jon. Part of his training.”

  “You like Jon?”

  “Oh, we get on well enough. Very well, I guess? He’s clever—or maybe you don’t think so.”

  “I try not to sit in judgment on anyone.”

  She laughed. “He is clever, with two scholarships and everything. And he’s fun to be with; we have a good time. But some of his friends…some of them are pretty strange.”

  Rick followed her gaze and saw two boys closely entwined, kissing each other slowly and deeply. He looked away and said, “You mean Web?”

  “He’s not really strange, just impatient with the world. I try to like him, but the way he goes at people! I mean, he’s one of the cleverest people I know, but it’s like his intellect has grown up and the rest of him hasn’t. Oh, hey, I shouldn’t be talking like this. I guess I drank too much.”

  “Web has the same effect on me, don’t worry. The hell with him. Tell me, is your father still playing in the quartet?”

  Lena smiled. “He’s the leader. I thought you were a fan?”

  “Since I graduated, it’s been difficult to find the time to go to concerts. I guess I sort of lost touch.”

  “We’re still playing, and we’re easy enough to find.”

  “The concert hall in the park? You said we, right? You play in the quartet?”

  “Second violin. Not that I’m ever going to earn a living from it. That’s why I’m at the University, studying hydroponics.”

  They talked about music for a while, leaning companionably at the railing with their backs to the rest of the party. Rick told Lena about how as an undergraduate he had played keyboards at church services in the city to help support himself; how he would sometimes slip in a little Bach to relieve the tedium of laying down the easy hymn chords.

  “That old tyrant!” Lena exclaimed.

  “You don’t like Bach? The best of his stuff gives me the feeling I get when I understand a mathematical derivation. Like seeing a cathedral all at once. Bach and Mozart, and some of the systems stuff…”

  “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with Bach,” Lena said. “But I’ve done his pieces so often now, and there’s no room in it for your own expression. He gets right down into your muscles and you have to let him, too, or you can’t play it. A real old tyrant.” What she liked most were the lyricists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Not critically acceptable, I know, but the feeling of a personal landscape in Elgar’s violin concerto. It beats the whole canon of the systems bunch. Not that I’ll ever get a chance to perform most of my favourites, there just aren’t enough musicians on the world to form an orchestra.” She gestured grandly toward the night beyond the railing, the dark roofs which stepped away downhill and the patterned lights of the city beyond. Slim silver bracelets on her wrist chimed against each other. “It’s a damned small world, isn’t it?”

  “When I came here from Mount Airy, I thought it would take me a lifetime to explore Port of Plenty. Now I’m just beginning to learn just how small it is.”

  “You know what I think? We’re all pretending it will go away because otherwise we’d have to admit we really aren’t in control, that we really don’t know anything compared to what’s out there in the universe.”

  Rick turned from the railing, unsettled by her intensity. A floodlight sprung from the trap of night. Across the roof terrace, people were clapping in slow rhythm as a young woman swayed with slow blissful deliberation, discarding layers of black gauze one by one.

  He said, “I guess I ought to be getting back home. Come on, I’ll go and say my farewell.”

  When they reached the table in the corner, de Ramaira said, “You’re just in time to save me. These two take things so seriously it’s not true.”

  Rick set his tumbler down and said, “I have to go now.” No matter when I leave, he realised, there can be no grace. I do not fit here.

  “So soon?�
�� De Ramaira’s chair scraped back as he stood. “Well, I’ll show you the way down.”

  Lena shook back her heavy black hair. “Perhaps we’ll see you around?”

  “Maybe,” Rick said.

  Web crumbled the sheet of paper and threw it over his shoulder. It tipped the railing, spun out into darkness. “I might come see you. There are a few technical things I want to clear up.” His voice held an edge of studied defiance, as if he felt that he was laying down a challenge.

  Across the table, Jon frowned but said nothing.

  “We’re always there for consultation,” Rick told Web, and turned to follow de Ramaira. The young woman had given up her striptease halfway through. Arms folded under her bare breasts, she leaned against the railing watching two boys slowly dance around each other, gesturing with stiff, abrupt movements like a couple of stoned lizards. Others formed a loose semicircle around them; handclaps staggered in a slow uncertain rhythm.

  As he followed de Ramaira down the helical staircase, Rick said quietly, “Do you think you’re playing games with those kids?”

  “They aren’t kids,” de Ramaira said, no answer at all. “Mind the last step.”

  “Seriously, do you think Web was in earnest about trying to take over the relay station?”

  “Do you?” de Ramaira countered. Then he laughed. “I can’t tell. He’s Jon friend, not mine at all.” As they went down the narrow hallway, he asked, “Would you report him to the cops?”

  “That would be a dumb thing to do,” Rick said uncomfortably.

  “Indeed, Doctor. Here.” The door opened on the dark street. “Have a safe walk home.”

  “Will you be back at work?”

  De Ramaira smiled. “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not. Goodbye then, for now.”

  “Don’t stay up too late hatching evil plots.”

  Rick started around the corner, but at the top of the street’s steep descent he stopped, suddenly realising why Lena had come over to talk to him. She’d been defending Jon all along, he thought, and I didn’t see. He frowned (a sudden image of himself fallen at her feet amid the partygoers, sobbing an apology) and walked on down the hill.